Harold Innis's Communications Theories - Communications Theories - Western Civilization in Peril

Western Civilization in Peril

Harold Innis's analysis of the effects of communications on the rise and fall of empires led him, in the end, to warn grimly that Western civilization was now facing its own profound crisis. The development of "mechanized" communications media such as mass-circulation newspapers had shifted the balance decisively in favour of space and power, over time, continuity and knowledge. Industrial societies cut time into precise fragments suitable to engineers and accountants and Western civilization suffered from an "obsession with present-mindedness" that eliminated concerns about past or future. Communications media that transmit information quickly over long distances had upset the balance required for cultural survival. "The overwhelming pressure of mechanization evident in the newspaper and the magazine," Innis wrote, "has led to the creation of vast monopolies of communication. Their entrenched positions involve a continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity. The emphasis on change is the only permanent characteristic."

The crisis facing the West was worsened, Innis argued, because communications monopolies that ran the media were largely immune from outside challenge. They literally spoke the language of the masses, effectively penetrating popular consciousness and shaping public opinion. American media, with their dependence on advertising and therefore mass appeal, were extremely effective at mobilizing large audiences. Not only were Americans exhorted to buy the newest "improved" products, they were also exposed to a barrage of propaganda from political elites. Theodore Roosevelt mastered the newspaper as a communications device, just as his fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt mastered radio. The news media were also influenced by a large public relations industry that shaped public opinion on behalf of powerful interests.

Innis believed that the overwhelming spatial bias of modern media was heightened in the United States by the development of powerful military technologies, including atomic weapons. The advent of the Cold War led to such an emphasis on military preparedness that the U.S. was placed on a permanent war footing, its economy increasingly dependent on the manufacture of weapons. As Canadian scholar Arthur Kroker writes, "Innis's political lesson was clear: the United States was now a fully 'space-oriented' society, with no inner coordinating principle and with no organic conception of 'lived tradition,' time, succession or duration which might act as an inner check against the politics of imperialism."

Biographer John Watson writes that "the United States represents to Innis something akin to cultural apocalypse." In an essay entitled, "Technology and Public Opinion in U.S.A," Innis concluded that the United States depended on a foreign policy shaped by military power. "Dependence on organized power and a traditional antipathy to coloured peoples weakens political sensitivity, and lack of experience with problems of continuity and empire threatens the Western world with uncertainty and war." Innis was among the first to suggest that the U.S. had lost the balance between power and knowledge essential to its long-term survival.

Western civilization could only be saved, Innis argued, by recovering the balance between space and time. For him, that meant reinvigorating the oral tradition within universities while freeing institutions of higher learning from political and commercial pressures. In his essay, A Plea for Time, he suggested that genuine dialogue within universities could produce the critical thinking necessary to restore the balance between power and knowledge. Then, universities could muster the courage to attack the monopolies that always imperil civilization.